The news that Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, is in talks to buy Wyeth, a big biotech company, signals a new wave of mergers and acquisitions in the drug discovery and development world. And it almost certainly heralds an era of another round of job cuts in Big Pharma, as the largest companies morph into a new beast—Mega Pharma.

This beast feeds on blockbuster drugs to pay the bills. Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert in 2000 for $90 million to acquire cholesterol drug Lipitor. That patent expires in 2011, so Pfizer needs another revenue generator. The company bought Pharmacia for $60 million in 2003 to gain Celebrex, but that turned out to be a bad move when Merck’s Vioxx, another so-called COX-II inhibitor, had fatal side effects. Working researchers shun such news, because it demonstrates that MegaPharma is more interested in buying rather than developing drugs.

“Pfizer is spending $7.5 billion a year in research and producing almost nothing, and now it has to buy Wyeth,” Michael Krensavage, founder of Krensavage Asset Management in New York, said in a blog interview. “If its pipeline were producing, it wouldn’t need to buy Wyeth.”

The merger, if approved this year, as planned, would make Pfizer the US’s fourth largest company by market value, after Exxdon, Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble, according to one financial blog.

Meanwhile, Roche, which owns 56 percent of Genentech, wants to merge
with the South San Francisco biotech company by taking advantage of lower stock prices to gain more shares.

Also, GSK, is looking into further job cuts
after a bad 4th quarter in 2008. Analysts say the company still hasn’t recovered from the 2001 merger that created the company—perhaps a cautionary tale for other Mega Pharma movements. Merck is also looking to bolster its pipeline by buying biotechs.

The pharma gloom continues. Astra Zeneca has annouynced plans to cut 7,400 jobs worldwide by 2013, after posting a 1.4 percent decline in 2008’s 4th quarter.
1.4% decline in fourth-quarter net profit and unveiled plans to cut a further 7,400 jobs world-wide by 2013
.
But not all pharma companies are suffering. Sanofi Aventis is looking to grow

Clearly, it’s not a great time to be looking for a pharma job. But some company, somewhere will develop a great new drug. I’ve said before that a company’s pipeline is key—not only to its financial success-but whether you want to work there. Joining a company that has a portfolio consisting mainly of expiring patents, with no promising candidates, could doom your future at a Big (or Mega) pharma. Joining a smaller or midsize biotech may seem riskier, but companies with drugs in several stages of clinical trials and other compounds in pre-clinical stages may actually result in a more stable (and, potentially more scientifically satisfying—situation than being in a large company that buys, rather than develops, its own R&D.